Dwayne Smith: Unum's two million dollar man

Recently I found that Unum, a Fortune 500 company that provides long term and short term disability, group life and long term care insurance for more than 100,000 companies, uses OneNote 2007!  Looks like they save over $2 million by switching to OneNote by going to a paperless system.  In the economic conditions companies are always looking to save money and get the most of out of their IT investments (wow I didn’t mean to sound like a marketing person). 

Anyhow so I got access to an article written about Unum’s story and man behind it all: Dwayne Smith.

Dwayne Smith: Unum's two million dollar man

Monday, May 4, 2009

When Group Underwriting Consultant Dwayne Smith heard about a project focused on moving the new prospect workflow in Underwriting to a paperless system, he thought about the way he keeps all his volunteer work organized and paperless. And his idea saved Unum $2 million.

“In my volunteer work as a board member, officer and chair of several committees with a couple of nonprofit groups, I had been using Microsoft OneNote 2007 on my laptop as an organizational tool to keep my board and committee work and other projects organized so that information was easily available right at my fingertips," said Smith.

Microsoft OneNote 2007 is a digital notebook that delivers the flexibility to gather and organize text, files, email and more in a digital notebook right on your computer.

“Thinking OneNote would be a great option to allow Underwriting to go paperless, I developed a prototype using a real case and presented this to Tim Arnold and his team as a workable option,” Smith said.

Arnold, vice president, Regional Underwriting, agreed to assemble a pilot team with employees from Chattanooga,Portland and Worcester to test the software as well as user acceptance, and it passed with flying colors.

Based on overwhelmingly positive feedback from the users, Underwriting management decided this was the option to pursue for the paperless initiative. Full implementation has been taking place during the month of March, rolling out the application and new process to the Underwriting organization and its support areas.

“Dwayne has been instrumental in the initial success we've experienced with the implementation of OneNote,” said Smith's manager, Assistant Vice President Bob Berry.

Using OneNote in Underwriting is providing efficiency gains, cost reductions and also facilitates support of the corporate environmental initiative.

“Thanks to Unum's support of employee volunteerism in the community, there are great ideas and improvements coming back to our company to help us with efficiency gains, workflow improvements and a new way to help save the environment,” said Smith. “I think it is great to see Unum's investment in our communities coming back around in full circle to benefit our employees, customers and the company.”

-- By Amanda Carmichael